Product Managers Are Unicorns

What’s rare and wonderful?

Product managers are unicorns.

What does that mean?

There are two aspects to our unicornity, to coin a phrase:

The numbers

The role itself

First of all, let’s look at some numbers. There are almost always fewer product managers in a company than any other role except CEO. There are more VPs than product managers in most product companies. There are five times as many developers, minimum. There are often 10-20 times as many salespeople.

This means that in our nature, we are statistical outliers. Like unicorns.

But there’s more.

And it’s related to “what makes a good product manager.”

In this podcast I mostly explore the latter point, especially as it related to defining what makes “a great product manager” and if you can test or screen for that.

The original tweet that got me started on this episode

John Cutler (@johncutlefish on Twitter) tweeted this observation a few weeks ago:

someone asked me this over the weekend:

"what product management skills can be tested and graded"

…it bothered me for various reasons. But that might be my bias. Those with a fresh mind on this…. ?#prodmgmt

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